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November 28, 2011

do we need x-men to avoid another world war?

The movie 13 Days starring Kevin Costner was about the Cuban Crisis that took place in 1962, when. Americans found out that Soviets were about to plant nuclear missiles in Cuba. And of course, USA had no intention to allow such a risk so close to their mainland.

But it was somehow a minor detail in the movie that, USA had already planted nuclear weapons in Turkey, which is pretty much the very same thing Soviets were trying to do in Cuba. Yet, Turkey was merely mentioned in the movie as if the whole thing was something with no importance at all. Wait a minute, the whole thing had indeed no importance at all. You put nuclear weapons or you take them back depending on the on going political situation. What's Turkey got to do with such gravely political matters?

Anyway, it was a realistic drama about the Cuban political crisis. And when I say realistic, I don't of course mean that the movie was loyal to all the facts about the situation. No, such a thing is rather impossible because I don't think there is a way to know all the facts about it. However, it was realistic in the sense that the event and the characters who took place in it were portrayed in their natural phyiscal features. I mean, there weren't any flying men around, for example.

But it is too much to expect historical and political accuracy from a movie. After all, a movie is a way to tell a story, and there are zillion ways to tell the very same story. Think about it, it would have been a completely differet movie if it had been made by the Soviets. Of course, there weren't any Soviets in the year 2000 : )

The way I see it, when it comes to historical and political accuracy, the movie 13 Days is not any different than any other movie with the same plot even if there are super heores in it. Oh well, there is a movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis with super heroes in it: X-Men First Class. In this movie, the entire crisis turns out to be a conspiracy designed by a super villain, and X-Men save the day, even before they were oficially called X-Men.

Turkey is again mentioned in this latter movie, but she is still just a pawn in the league of big players.

So OK, it was either the common-sense of the politicians or the X-Men, a nuclear war was avoided that time. My question is, will the world be able to avoid such a crisis one more time, or are we just heading full speed to another World War. While I sincerely wish that we can avoid it one more time, I am rather pessimistic about it.

I recently read a book called "Huzur" (Peace, in English) from Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, a great Turkish novelist. The book was first published in 1942, and it is a shame on my part that it took so long for me to discover such a great writer. Any way, very interestingly, the characters in his book had some very interesting thoughts about the upcoming war - which was WWII for them, of course.

So in a friendly chat about the upcoming war, one of the characters says that: "A war can be avoided if it is a political one. But there is no way to avoid it if the world is shifting to another state." When you think about it, the Cuban Crisis was indeed a political one with no intention to shift the world's political state. However, today, the world is changing and there is a war coming with the clear intent to re-shape the world.

I have a very little hope that a catastrophe will be avoided, simply because another character in the same novel says that "And now we expect that, those people who caused this crisis will suddenly change their minds and come to reason." Of course, he wrote that in a marvelous way, very hard for me to translate literally.